BBC ON THIS DAY | 6 | 1997: Diana's funeral watched by millions About This Site | Text Only 1997: Diana's funeral watched by millions Britain and the world have said farewell to Diana, Princess of Wales, at the end of an unprecedented week of mourning. A four mile procession brought her coffin to Westminster Abbey, where politicians and celebrities joined the Royal Family in a subdued congregation. Over a million people lined the route of the funeral cortege to the abbey and along her final journey to the Spencer family home in Northamptonshire. The day began at 0908 BST, when the coffin left Kensington Palace on a gun carriage. Some of the crowd wept, some applauded quietly, but most watched in silence. On top of the coffin was a poignant reminder that this woman loved by millions was also a mother - a card to "Mummy" from one of her sons. The two princes, William and Harry, joined their father, grandfather and the princess's brother walking behind the coffin. She was the very essence of compassion Earl Spencer Other members of the Royal Family watched the funeral cortege pass from the gates of Buckingham Palace.

The union jack on top of the palace was lowered to half mast for the first time ever. Both Diana's sisters read tributes to her at the funeral service and Elton John played his re-worked version of Candle in the Wind. Her brother, Lord Spencer, made a funeral address in which he described as Diana the "very essence of compassion, of duty, of style, of beauty". He used the speech to blame the media for her death, calling her the "most hunted person of the modern age". The grieving earl also pledged to protect William and Harry and prevent them suffering a similar fate. The sometimes controversial oration was greeted with spontaneous applause. A very public day of mourning ended with a private ceremony when Diana was finally buried on an island in the heart of her family estate at Althorp. A route long enough to accommodate the millions of mourners Palace Announces Further Changes to Funeral Route Buckingham Palace has responded to public concerns by extending the route that Diana, Princess of Wales's, coffin will travel on its way to Westminster Abbey. The route has been lengthened to allay fears that there would not be sufficient opportunities to see the procession pass on its way to the Abbey.

The route had already been extended from the funeral service to her final resting place at the family seat at Althorp in Northamptonshire. From Kensington Palace......... The cortege will now leave from Kensington Palace - Diana's home - which will mean a threefold increase in the processional route. The coffin will travel along Kensington High Street, past the Albert Memorial, beneath Wellington Arch to Constitution Hill and the Mall. ....to the Abbey The cortege will depart at 10.00 BST. The coffin will be carried on a gun carriage by riders of the King's Troop and escorted by mounted police. The rest of the procession will join the coffin at the Mall - as originally planned. A palace spokesman said there was no question of bowing to public pressure, but the new route was "a safe and secure way of ensuring that more people can see the procession". After the service, the hearse will journey from the Abbey to Constitution Hill. From there it will proceed slowly to the M1 along streets expected to be lined by hundreds of thousands of mourners. The route from St James's Palace to the Abbey From Constitution Hill, the cortege will continue to Apsley Way and Wellington Arch.

It will then proceed to Hyde Park Corner and along Park Lane, Cumberland Gate, Tyburn Way, Marble Arch, Oxford Street, Portman Street to Gloucester Place. Turning towards Lord's cricket ground, the procession will swing along Park Road to Wellington Road (A41) and then north along the busy Finchley Road. Moving into Hendon Way, it will then journey over the Brent Cross flyover, where thousands more will turn out to pay their respects. The cortege will negotiate the streets of north London on its way to the family home It will then proceed around the North Circular Road (A406) to Staples Corner, scene of the 1993 IRA bomb blast - to the start of the M1 at Junction 1. It will follow the motorway and leave it at Junction 15A near Wootton in Northamptonshire. A Chance to Say Goodbye A Palace spokeswoman said: "Although there is no lying in state, obviously we want to ensure that as many of the public who wish to can share in the grieving." Two giant screens will be put up in London's Hyde Park to relay TV coverage of the funeral.

There had been growing concern for public safety and calls for an extension to the funeral route from St James's Palace to Westminster Abbey, which could be lined by up to two million people. The World At One's John Leyne reports on feelings outside Buckingham Palace Dur:1'40" The Prince of Wales, Prince William and Prince Harry will fly back to London on Friday, and will visit the Chapel Royal at St James's Palace, where Princess of Wales's coffin is lying. The Queen, Duke of Edinburgh and Queen Mother will travel overnight by Royal Train on Friday from Balmoral to be in London for Saturday morning. Special buses and trains are being laid on to cope with the huge crowds expected for the event. However, Westminster Underground station is to be closed for fear of overcrowding. The Service Five hundred representatives of charities linked with the Princess of Wales will follow her coffin as it makes its way on a gun carriage to Westminster Abbey. A one-minute's silence will be observed after the service, before the Princess's coffin is taken to Althorp, her family home in Northamptonshire.

The funeral service will last about 50 minutes, and will be relayed to a large screen near the Abbey for those taking part in the procession to watch, and by loudspeaker to the crowds. A Palace spokesman said for practical reasons those in the procession would not be able to attend the service itself, but one further representative from each charity would be invited. A spokesman for the Prime Minister said the funeral would be a public event reflecting the fact that Diana was "the People's Princess". The Downing Street spokesman said: "The Prime Minister thinks the outpouring of grief has been a reflection of the depth of affection and appreciation that people felt for Princess Diana and that the funeral should reflect that." Even though this will not be a state funeral, many countries will be represented on Saturday. For the United States, Hillary Clinton, the wife of US President Bill Clinton will attend. France will send Bernadette Chirac, wife of the French President, Jacques Chirac. A "Unique Funeral For a Unique Person" Royal funerals traditionally fall into three categories.

The state funeral is usually for sovereigns alone, but on rare occasions has been arranged to honour exceptionally distinguished people such as Lord Nelson, the Duke of Wellington, and in 1965 Sir Winston Churchill. St Mary's, Great Brington, houses the 16th century Spencer family vault There is also a "ceremonial royal funeral" for members of the Royal Family with high military rank, for the sovereign's consort and the heir to the throne. The third category is the private royal funeral, for all other members of the Royal Family, their spouses and their children. Asked which category applied to the funeral of Diana, the Palace spokeswoman said: "The status is irrelevant. This is a unique funeral for a unique person." Diana's well documented divorce from the Prince of Wales in 1996 effectively removed her from the inner circle of the Royal Family and "Her Royal Highness" was removed from her title. However, as the mother of the future King, Prince William, Diana's place as a prominent member of the Royal Family was secured. She is arguably the most prominent Briton to die since Winston Churchill. Diana's funeral is likely to be a media event unrivalled in Britain in recent history.

Her wedding in 1981 was seen by an estimated 700 million viewers worldwide. A spokesman for Buckingham Palace said, "The funeral will contain the usual elements of a Royal funeral, and in particular elements to reflect the affection with which the Princess was held." It is expected that members of both families would visit the Chapel Royal to see the light wood coffin, but no details were being announced. Members of the public are being invited to sign a book of condolence . It is the first time a condolence book has been opened at a royal palace in recent times. Politics97 will be providing RealAudio and RealVideo coverage, for which you will need a Player . Diana’s Love for Hasnat Khan—The Only One Who Would Never Betray Her | Vanity Fair Twitter LOVE, ACTUALLY Left, Dr. Hasnat Khan, London. Right, Princess Diana at a charity event in London in December 1995, a few months after first meeting Khan, in a waiting room at the Royal Brompton Hospital, where she was visiting a friend’s husband., Left, by Mark Stewart/Camera Press/Redux; right, By Tim Rooke/Rex Usa.

In London, there is a Princess Diana memorial fountain in Hyde Park, not far from the Princess Diana memorial playground. In gift shops, you can buy a Princess Diana memorial tartan. But perhaps the best-known monument to the late Princess can be found in the basement of Harrods department store, which was, from 1985 to 2010, owned by Mohamed Al Fayed, the father of Dodi Al Fayed, with whom Diana had her last fling. In a city of monuments, it is one of the newest, put up in the aftermath of the August 31, 1997, car crash that took Diana’s and Dodi’s lives. A Harrods salesclerk gave me directions: “Downstairs, to the right, through the shoe department.” The memorial consists of side-by-side color photos of Dodi and Diana, framed by golden interlocking *D’*s and sculpted albatross.

Set in an acrylic pyramid in front of the photographs is the famous and controversial “engagement ring” that Dodi bought Diana the day before their deaths, along with a smudged wineglass—preserved, as the inscription notes, “in the exact condition it was left on the couple’s last evening together at the Imperial Suite at the Hotel Ritz in Paris.” Mohamed Al Fayed has attempted to preserve a similarly lasting impression of his version of the relationship between Diana and his late son. Mohamed, a self-styled enemy of the British establishment, has long maintained that Dodi was murdered by the British secret service, as part of a conspiracy involving members of the royal family, because he was a Muslim about to marry the mother of a future King of England. Al Fayed’s insistence on this plot outline—and on the allegation that Diana was pregnant when she died—has been so zealous that in 2008, more than 10 years after the fact, it engulfed what would otherwise have been a bureaucratic and largely pro forma coroner’s inquest into the deaths of Diana and Dodi.

(The inquest had had to await the completion of a French police investigation, which lasted until 2003, and of an independent follow-on British police investigation, which began in 2004.) The coroner’s inquest lasted 89 days. Diana’s closest confidants in her last years did not need an inquest to know the absurdity of Al Fayed’s claims. Not only was she not planning to marry Dodi Al Fayed, or pregnant with his child, they say, but she was in fact still “madly in love,” as one of them describes it, with another man, an unassuming Pakistani heart surgeon named Hasnat Khan. Khan leans into Princess Diana’s BMW, near the Royal Brompton Hospital, London, 1996. With some success, Diana worked hard to keep the press away from Khan., By Brendan Beirne/Rex USA. A Serious Man No monument recalls their romance. Diana’s love affair with Hasnat Khan was secret. He was as understated as Dodi was flashy, as remote as Dodi was public, as somber as Dodi was carefree.

Though they were together for two years, Diana and Hasnat were largely unknown as a couple. They spent much of their time together in Kensington Palace, where they could avoid the paparazzi and their cameras. When they ventured out, it was often in Hasnat’s Chelsea neighborhood, sometimes with Diana wearing a dark wig and sunglasses. Hasnat Khan has been described as a serious man. More specifically, at the time he met Diana, he was a modestly paid junior surgeon employed by the National Health Service. He worked 90-hour weeks and, like most surgeons at his stage of career, he simply wanted to sleep when he got home. Diana threw herself into the almost aggressive normalcy of his existence. Her friends tell stories about how she puttered around his small one-bedroom apartment and tidied up, doing the dishes and folding his laundry. Hasnat didn’t ride or hunt. He liked jazz and Guinness, so he and Diana stood in line to see the late-night acts. If they argued, Diana sometimes sent her butler, Paul Burrell, to talk things over with Hasnat at a local pub, the Anglesea Arms, in Chelsea. It’s hard to imagine Dodi socializing with the help.

In recent months I have sought out the people who knew Diana and Hasnat when they were together. In my reporting, I also combed through inquest transcripts, police reports, and the published writings of friends, acquaintances, journalists, biographers, and employees in Diana’s circle. Diana has given rise to a lucrative memoir niche, but Hasnat has been noteworthy in not sharing his story. He has given occasional interviews to British tabloids but, according to a friend of his who agreed to talk to me on his behalf, regretted them all for the headlines that resulted, like this one from the Mirror in 2002: POOR HASNAT IS LOCKED IN GRIEF. HE SAYS IT IS ONE BIG NIGHTMARE. Hasnat’s most significant disclosures came in 2008, when the British inquest looking into Diana’s death required his testimony, and even then Hasnat elected to stay in Pakistan and instead offered the inquest his responses from his official interview with the British police, in 2004, as their own investigation got under way. The contents of this interview had never before been made public.

More recently, in January 2012, Hasnat received a letter from Scotland Yard, notifying him that the police had found his name and cell-phone number during its investigation into phone hacking by the News of the World. The hacking, if it occurred, would have been done either at the time of his relationship with Diana or before the inquest, when the press was eager to determine if Hasnat was going to attend. He has brought a civil claim against News Corporation. Whatever money he might get from the company, he has said, he will donate to the hospital cardiac unit he has opened in Pakistan to serve impoverished children. In September, the British production companies Embankment Films and Ecosse Films will release a movie called Diana, starring Naomi Watts in the title role and focusing on the last two years of Diana’s life and specifically on her relationship with Hasnat. He has not cooperated and is said to have laughed at some of the scenes the movie conjures. Perhaps Hasnat’s discretion, in the end, has been his greatest gift to Diana. “Everybody sells me out,” she told a friend the summer of her death.

“Hasnat is the one person who will never sell me out.” Next The Name on the Shoes Their first meeting was by chance, and for the most famous woman in the world, his reaction was unusually abrupt. On September 1, 1995, Hasnat Khan, the attending surgeon, had come to a waiting room at the Royal Brompton Hospital to tell Oonagh Toffolo, an acupuncturist and self-described healer, that he had to rush her husband, Joseph, back to the operating room. Hasnat had assisted at her husband’s triple-bypass surgery the day before, but there had been a complication and the patient was hemorrhaging. As Hasnat relayed the news, Toffolo introduced him to the visitor who had arrived that morning: Princess Diana. Hasnat nodded perfunctorily and then left the waiting room to go about his business. “It is doubtful if in her entire adult life Diana, the Princess of Wales, had ever made less of an impression on someone!,” Toffolo wrote in the Mirror after Diana’s death.

Diana waited two beats, to make sure Khan was gone, and then turned to her friend: “Oonagh, isn’t he drop-dead gorgeous?” Diana wasn’t missing a detail: “And his name is Hasnat Khan,” she went on. “It’s written on his shoes.” Oonagh Toffolo was part of the retinue—healers, hairdressers, astrologists, masseuses—that Diana gathered around her as she distanced herself from her royal life. She had been officially separated from Charles in 1992 and by the time she met Hasnat Khan she was living alone in Kensington Palace. She had cycled through many of her friends, owing to perceived or actual slights, and sometimes out of simple boredom. She changed her cell-phone number every six months to foil anyone—such as the British secret service, not to mention the British tabloids—who she believed might be trying to listen to her calls, but the rotation had another consequence. “It was an incredibly effective way of dumping people,” Richard Kay, a Daily Mail journalist who was one of her favorites, told me.

“By the end, the number of friends she had you could count on one hand.” What followed that cursory introduction at the hospital was an unlikely romance, a two-year Roman Holiday affair that many close to Diana say was the most significant relationship since her marriage to Prince Charles. For the 35-year-old Princess, Hasnat Khan represented not just a secret, illicit romance. He was a shot at normalcy, at a life away from the increasingly unfriendly spotlight, and a man with whom Diana hoped she might find the personal happiness that had long eluded her. One friend of Diana’s told me, “When you think of the kind of men Diana must have met or been with or seen—here is a man who is completely and totally selfless. She said she’d never met anybody like him.” After that first visit to Joseph Toffolo, Diana returned to see him every day during his nearly three-week hospital stay. Diana was soon to be divorced, and she knew it.

“She was conflicted in this time in her life,” Patrick Jephson, her onetime private secretary, told me, “between some undefined yearning for normality—her concept of normality is not normal, it must be said—and what was a reaction to the traumatic experience of her separation and divorce. You must remember that she didn’t join the royal family to be Princess. She joined the royal family to be Queen.” Shortly after meeting Hasnat, Diana found herself alone in a hospital elevator with him, and their eyes locked. “I think I’ve met my Mr. Wonderful,” she told Simone Simmons, her energy healer, as Simmons recalled in a recent conversation. Diana added that Hasnat had “dark-brown velvet eyes that you could just sink into.” She often showed up at the hospital late at night to avoid detection. “I found Diana very down to earth, and she made everyone feel at ease,” Hasnat told police in his official interview in 2004, speaking of her manner at the hospital.

“I did notice that she was also very flirtatious with everyone.” Diana was circling Hasnat, and it took about two weeks, until mid-September, for them to have their first date, in the form of a visit to his Aunt Jane and Uncle Omar’s house in Stratford-upon-Avon, to pick up some books. “I did not think for one minute that she would say yes, but I asked her if she would like to come with me,” Hasnat recalled, according to the transcript of his interview with the police. “I was very surprised when she said she would.” They drove together, and Diana met Omar and Jane. She and Hasnat had dinner and drove back to London. “After this, our friendship turned into a relationship,” he said. Princess Diana leaving the English National Ballet, London, 1996., © Andanson-Cardinale-Ruet/Sygma/Corbis. Call from Dr. Armani In November of 1995, Diana, as a joke, sent a large flower arrangement to Hasnat at the hospital. There was no card with the flowers, though Hasnat knew exactly who had sent them.

The hospital staff watched with amusement as Hasnat carried the flowers through the corridors. They suspected, but didn’t know for sure, where the arrangement had come from. Eventually, someone called the florist and pretended to be inquiring on Hasnat’s behalf. The caller threatened to return the flowers if Hasnat didn’t learn who had sent them. The florist finally admitted they had been ordered from Kensington Palace. “After this, the press went everywhere trying to get information on me,” Hasnat told the police. “They visited old girlfriends, my medical school, and retired professors whom I had known.” It was an early warning sign for Hasnat, who came to see the press as a major stumbling block. For Diana, the media formed a backdrop to her everyday life and represented something that she both resented and needed. Her nocturnal visits to the hospital stopped temporarily after November 30, 1995, when she was intercepted outside it by a photographer from the News of the World. Familiar by now with all of the tabloid editors and reporters who covered her, she took the photographer’s cell phone and spoke directly to Clive Goodman, the paper’s royal correspondent.

(Goodman would be jailed in 2005 for hacking into the voice mails of Diana’s sons, William and Harry.) She told him that she visited the Royal Brompton several times a week for hours at a time. Of the terminally ill patients she visited, she said, “Some will live and some won’t live—but they all need to be loved while they’re here.” The story—“My Secret Nights as an Angel”—appeared three days later and led with a reference to Diana’s recently alleged affair with the English Rugby star Will Carling. (AT LEAST I’M NOT HERE WITH MR. CARLING, read one of the News of the World headlines.) Diana, though still big business for editors, had worn out her welcome with the press. When she and Prince Charles were young and married—and, later, when the entire press corps blamed him for her unhappiness—she could do no wrong, and it was in everyone’s interest to build her up. But over the years she had told a few lies and attempted to twist the story too much in her favor. Reports of affairs with other men—one of them (Carling) married—had damaged the view of her as a victim.

“She had a very tetchy relationship with the media,” her former press secretary Jane Atkinson told me. “There was a lot of mistrust about the information they received from her, and a lot of rivalry for stories.” The News of the World article gave fodder to critics who saw Diana as unhinged and desperate to be around desperate people. Private Eye, the satirical fortnightly magazine, weighed in with the “Di-No Card,” a fictional card that an ill person could clip from the magazine and present in order to stave off a royal visit. (“At last, with the new Di-No Card, you are guaranteed 100% protection from the woman who wants to love you.”) But ridicule was a small price to pay for keeping the romance with Hasnat out of the newspapers—a tactic that worked, for a while. Throughout 1996, Diana nurtured the relationship. Hasnat smoked and brought takeout to Kensington Palace. Diana, who never smoked and who obsessed about her weight, started to set out ashtrays from Thomas Goode and Hermès.

“I’d find the ash tipped into the dustbin in my pantry, scattered on top of Kentucky Fried Chicken boxes,” Paul Burrell, Diana’s butler, wrote in one of his books. Hasnat’s button-down shirts stretched over a small paunch. He worked obsessively and often had little time for the Princess. “Why do you like him?” a friend asked her, mystified by the attraction. “Oh, I love him,” Diana replied. “He is so dedicated to his work.” In truth, his work was both an attraction and a hindrance. “When he wasn’t working, he wanted to sleep,” a friend of his told me. Such a schedule didn’t suit Diana, who would call multiple times when Khan was in surgery, leaving messages under false names, such as Dr. Armani. Her late-night visits made hospital administrators worry about press intrusion. One hospital staffer told Jane Atkinson, “We’ve been terribly, terribly worried for a long time. She comes in the night and she goes off and sees Hasnat Khan and we’ve been terribly worried the story would break.” As Hasnat recalled for the police, the hospital “had started getting a bit upset by the disruption caused by Diana’s visits.

It was becoming a security issue.” But the concern didn’t stop Diana. Hasnat soon realized that Diana didn’t experience life the way “normal” people did. Even before her marriage to Charles, she was a member of one of the most fabled aristocratic families in England. Diana’s lineage can be traced back to Charles II. Her parents, Edward Spencer and Frances Shand Kydd, were the Viscount and Viscountess Althorp. “People joke that the only mistake she made was marrying beneath herself,” Jephson told me. With Hasnat, she reveled in the everydayness of his existence. “For example,” Hasnat told the police, “we once went to the pub together and Diana asked if she could order the drinks because she had never done so before. She really enjoyed the experience and chatted away happily to the barman.” On another occasion, the two waited in line outside Ronnie Scott’s, a jazz club in Soho. She called Simone Simmons from the line and said, as Simmons recalled, “You meet such interesting people queuing!” Once, when Hasnat was in Spain, she expressed a desire to fly and meet him there.

“I told her that she would not be able to just walk into the airport as everybody would be looking at her,” Hasnat told police. Diana replied that she would wear a wig to disguise herself. He pointed out, somewhat frustrated, that flying commercial in disguise was impossible, since she would look nothing like her passport photo. The abnormality of Diana’s life, as both a princess and a celebrity, strained the relationship and revealed how fleeting any lurch toward normalcy would be. “Going to Kentucky Fried Chicken might be what you would do if you were desperately pursuing normality,” Jephson told me. “She would go on holiday, but after two or three days she was climbing the walls because she needed to be entertained and needed to feed her public persona. She would say, ‘I want to be normal,’ but actually, when it came around to the business of being normal, it is damned inconvenient to have to park your car in a car park.” Meet the Parents Diana and Hasnat discussed marriage, and Diana told two friends I spoke to that she wanted to have a daughter with him. She introduced Hasnat to her sons. Diana went as far as to ask Paul Burrell to find someone who could discreetly marry them.

When Hasnat found out, he said, “Do you honestly think you can just bring a priest here and get married?” He told the police, “I thought it was a ridiculous idea.” When they weren’t hiding out in Kensington Palace, they talked about where they might go that would be shielded from the media glare. “I told her that the only way I could see us having a vaguely normal life together would be if we went to Pakistan, as the press don’t bother you there.” Diana strongly considered the idea. She also visited South Africa, where her brother, Charles Spencer, was living at the time, and Australia, to see whether there might be suitable places for the couple to live. The notion that Diana, with two sons in school in England, would even have entertained such options shows how fundamentally unrealistic she was. Throughout it all, Hasnat was leery of the press attention Diana received. “I did not want to have to look over my shoulder all the time,” he said. Princess Diana with her friend Jemima Khan, on a visit to young cancer patients at a hospital in Pakistan, 1997., By Tim Rooke/Rex USA.

On February 20, 1996, when she was deep in divorce negotiations with Charles, Diana flew to Pakistan with Lady Annabel Goldsmith, the wife of the financier James Goldsmith, and her niece, Cosima Somerset, aboard the Goldsmiths’ private Boeing 757. On the way, the women struggled with their pullout beds—“It was like a dormitory farce,” Somerset wrote in a remembrance of the late Princess. The professed purpose of the trip was to visit the cancer hospital of the famed Pakistani cricketer Imran Khan, who had recently married Lady Annabel’s daughter Jemima. After the separation from Charles, Diana and her two boys (who were in boarding school) had spent many Sundays with Ben Goldsmith, Lady Annabel’s youngest son, at her Ormeley Lodge, just outside London, where Diana found a surrogate family atmosphere amid the casual Sunday lunches. Jemima Khan became a friend of the Princess’s. Both Imran and Hasnat (who were distant cousins) were from traditional Pashtun families, and Diana sought out Jemima, who was nearly 15 years her junior, to discuss what it was like to be married to a Pakistani man.

“Diana was madly in love with Hasnat Khan and wanted to marry him,” Jemima told me, “even if that meant living in Pakistan, and that’s one of the reasons why we became friends.” Diana joked with Jemima about how difficult Pakistani men could be. For a “son to marry an English girl is every conservative Pashtun mother’s worst nightmare,” Jemima told me. “You send your son to be educated in England and he comes back with an English bride. It’s something they dread.” Diana must have felt that such objections would be no match for her charm. She believed she could win the family over. She corresponded with one of Hasnat’s grandmothers, known as Nanny Appa, with his family members acting as translators, and spent time at his Aunt Jane and Uncle Omar’s house in Stratford-upon-Avon. Back in London, Diana showed an interest in Hasnat’s career. She had asked Khan and the senior consultant he worked for, the prominent cardiologist Sir Magdi Yacoub, if she could witness a heart operation. In April 1996, a charity Yacoub had founded arranged for an operation to be televised.

A young boy had been flown in from Cameroon to receive a lifesaving procedure that wasn’t available to him at home. Hasnat would assist at the surgery. Diana showed up in heavy eye makeup (as press coverage of the event witheringly noted) and watched the proceedings in scrubs. By that point, Diana was seen as a would-be manipulator of the media. Among the journalists who covered her, everyone seemed to think that everyone else knew about Hasnat, but no one could be entirely sure. They played games with Diana, and she with them. In the earliest coverage of their first meeting, the Daily Mail noted that “Mr. Khan’s swarthy good looks have led to comparisons with Omar Sharif and Diana is said to feel inspired by his cool, clinical confidence.” On July 4, 1996, Prince Charles’s lawyers announced his offer for a divorce settlement. That night, Diana attended a fund-raiser at the Dorchester hotel for Imran Khan’s hospital, dressed in an ivory, pearl-studded shalwar kameez, a traditional Pakistani outfit that was a gift from Jemima Khan.

She had told friends she wanted to re-marry once the divorce from Charles was final, and she was trying to make inroads with Hasnat’s family. In Stratford-upon-Avon that summer, Diana met Nanny Appa, to whom she had been writing for several months. According to Kate Snell, author of the book Diana: Her Last Love, which is the basis for the upcoming Naomi Watts film, Diana invited Nanny Appa and Hasnat’s cousin Mumraiz, who was traveling with her, along with Hasnat’s Aunt Jane, to visit Kensington Palace, and they stopped in on their way to the airport the day they were returning to Pakistan. The cousin captured the visit on a video camera, with Diana sitting nervously next to Hasnat’s grandmother. The visit was filled with small misfires. Diana introduced Nanny Appa to her cook, a Bengali woman, who to the dismay of the grandmother did not speak Urdu. Diana watched as Nanny Appa inspected the tea sandwiches, carefully lifting the edges to see what was inside. Diana asked Aunt Jane to help her translate, and Hasnat’s grandmother, it turned out, was concerned that the sandwiches might contain ham, forbidden in a Muslim diet.

She had to be assured several times that the pinkish substance was in fact smoked salmon. Nanny Appa was perhaps right to worry. Diana “never thought about it that [Hasnat] was a strict Muslim,” Simone Simmons told me. “And she was very good at bacon sandwiches. So when he brought friends over, she made them bacon sandwiches, and it was a total disaster.” In October, Diana flew to Rimini, Italy, and accepted a humanitarian award along with Christiaan Barnard, the South African heart surgeon who in 1967 performed the world’s first successful human heart transplant. While there, she spoke with Barnard about Hasnat, trying to get him a job—something that infuriated Hasnat when he learned about it, months later. After Italy, she continued on to Sydney to open the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute, a medical facility named for a mentor of Hasnat’s who had been shot and killed in a botched kidnapping five years earlier.

Two days later, the Sunday Mirror ran the story that Hasnat had been dreading: DI’S NEW LOVE; HOW TOP HEART SURGEON FINALLY MENDED A SAD PRINCESS’S BROKEN HEART; HOW PRINCESS DI FELL IN LOVE WITH HASNAT KHAN. Richard Kay, of the Daily Mail, was one of a small number of reporters traveling with the Princess, and he called her assistant that day to ask that Diana get in touch with him to respond. Kay had become Diana’s go-to newspaper reporter, a reliable ally in her unending effort to protect and burnish her image. When Diana reached Kay, she assured him that the story was “bullshit,” and according to his article the next day, Diana had been “deeply upset” by the Sunday Mirror story because of the “hurt [it would] do William and Harry.” It quoted her as telling friends, “It has given me a lot of laughs. In fact, we are laughing ourselves silly over this.” “At the time, I accepted what she told me,” Kay recalled recently, adding that he made a “mental note” to follow up on the rumor. “We were in Sydney.

Visits to a Pakistani doctor did seem slightly difficult to comprehend.” As much as Hasnat wished to keep the romance a secret, to have Diana publicly disavow it hurt him, and it strengthened his gathering conviction that any sort of normal life with Diana would be impossible. Hasnat also began receiving threats in the mail—for instance a cutout picture of himself with a noose around his neck. Shortly after the Sydney trip, Kay says, he met Simone Simmons, Diana’s healer and confidante at the time, and Simmons told him all about the relationship with Hasnat. By early 1997, Diana had a new philanthropic focus. On January 15, she made her famous walk through an Angolan minefield and appeared to be finding new purpose. But it didn’t deflect her from Hasnat. In May of that year, Diana and Jemima Khan flew in Jemima’s father’s jet to Lahore. “She came to visit me twice in Pakistan to help fund-raise for Imran’s hospital, but both times she also went to meet his family secretly to discuss the possibility of marriage to Hasnat,” Jemima told me.

“She wanted to know how hard it had been for me to adapt to life in Pakistan and she wanted advice on how to deal with Pakistani men and their cultural baggage.” By now, Hasnat had decided he couldn’t marry her, and she knew it. “He was horrified by the secret wedding plan, and suddenly she saw all these pitfalls looming,” Richard Kay told me. Still, on this trip, winning over Hasnat’s mother, Naheed, was a top priority. Diana spent time with Imran’s sisters, Aleema and Rhanee. The three women agreed that, in order to avoid press attention, they would drive themselves to the family’s home in the Model Town neighborhood of Lahore. Ten minutes into the drive they found themselves in a traffic jam. After five minutes of sitting still, it dawned on Aleema that there they were, in the middle of Lahore, without bodyguards or drivers, with the mother of the future King of England. “Are we mad?!,” Aleema exclaimed. “We are like sitting ducks. If anything happens, this will create an international incident!” Soon enough, people on the highway started to recognize Diana, pointing toward the car and waving. “She was entirely unflappable,” Aleema remembers.

“She rolled her window down, smiled, and waved back at them.” Diana knew the address of the house by heart and directed Aleema as she drove. According to Snell’s account, aunts and uncles had gathered at the family home. The power had gone out in the house, and the group assembled in the garden in sweltering heat. They joked about the power outage. Aleema told me that, even after she and her sister felt it was time to leave, Diana wanted to continue the visit. Eventually, the women made their way back to Imran’s house in their Toyota. That night, Diana talked to Imran Khan, who promised to speak to Hasnat on Diana’s behalf. He never got the chance to do so. Diana died before Imran made it back to London. End of the Affair After her divorce, Diana was always looking for a way to spend time with her sons in a setting that could rival the lush privacy of the royal family’s Balmoral estate, in Scotland. When Mohamed Al Fayed invited her in June 1997 to spend a week at his villa in St. Tropez that July, Diana accepted, and looked forward to the privacy and security of Al Fayed’s residence.

For some of Diana’s trips to see Hasnat’s family, whether in Pakistan or Stratford-upon-Avon, Hasnat was not around. His work schedule prevented it. On June 21, Diana spent the day with his family in Stratford-upon-Avon. His grandmother Nanny Appa was visiting from Pakistan. Diana took several of Hasnat’s young cousins driving in her car and on trips to the grocery store. Snell writes about how Diana brought the cousins to the local Tesco and let them ride in the shopping cart. They attempted to hide her identity, telling other shoppers that her name was “Sharon,” but in the end no one was fooled. Diana on her cell phone later that month aboard the Jonikal, near St. Tropez, after her relationship with Dodi Al Fayed had begun., © Andanson-Cardinale-Ruet/Sygma/Corbis. Four days later, 79 of Diana’s dresses were auctioned off at Christie’s in New York, raising $3.25 million for her favorite charities and further shedding her royal baggage. On July 10, the night before she went to St. Tropez, Hasnat stayed with her at Kensington Palace.

“When Diana went to St. Tropez with Mr. Al Fayed, everything was fine between us,” Hasnat told police investigating her death. “After a few days, I felt something was wrong. Her mobile kept going on to answerphone.” Diana was being followed once again by the paparazzi, who took photos of her Jet Skiing off the beach near Al Fayed’s villa. In an impromptu press conference on July 14, she told the photographers following her, “You are going to get a big surprise with the next thing I do.” Mohamed Al Fayed called his son Dodi, who was in Paris with his fiancée, Calvin Klein model Kelly Fisher, and asked him to come down to help entertain Diana. Dodi obliged, and left Fisher in Paris. Mohamed had recently purchased a $30 million yacht, the Jonikal, with the express purpose of impressing Diana, according to Tina Brown’s biography of her. She and her boys spent time at the villa and aboard the boat with Dodi and family.

In the middle of the vacation, on July 16, Fisher flew from Paris to join Dodi but stayed on a different Al Fayed boat, and Dodi shuttled between Diana and her sons and his fiancée, until July 18, when Fisher left for a previously scheduled modeling assignment. The papers were filled with photos of Diana frolicking in the Mediterranean with her sons. Diana flew on July 22 to Milan to attend the funeral of the murdered fashion designer Gianni Versace. When she and Hasnat eventually spoke again, toward the end of July, Diana had come back from Milan and then secretly flown to Paris with Dodi for the weekend. “When you know someone very well, you know when something is not right, and that is exactly how I felt when I spoke to her,” Hasnat said of that period. “I told her I thought something was wrong because of the way she had been acting, but she just said that because of the geography of where she was, she was having problems getting reception on her phone.” Diana returned to London on July 27 and met Hasnat soon after in Battersea Park.

“She was not her normal self, and she kept looking at her mobile phone,” Hasnat told police about this meeting. He told her he thought she had met someone else, and it must be someone with a connection to Al Fayed. She denied there was anyone else. “At the end of our meeting in Battersea Park, we arranged to see each other again, the following day, at Kensington Palace It was at that second meeting that Diana told me that it was all over between us.” He continued: “I remember saying to her at the time, ‘You are dead,’ meaning her reputation was dead. I said this because I was sure that it was someone from Mohamed Al Fayed’s group and that was how I felt about anyone involved with him.” When her sons went to Balmoral for the month of August, Diana began traveling almost nonstop. She flew to Sardinia with Dodi on July 31 for a six-day cruise aboard the Jonikal, during which Dodi and Diana were photographed by the Italian paparazzo Mario Brenna, who had reportedly been tipped off by Diana herself. She returned to London on August 6 and went almost immediately to Bosnia as part of her campaign against land mines.

The trip was overshadowed by the publication on August 7 of Brenna’s photos of the couple embracing and by other tabloid stories about the apparent romance. (Kelly Fisher, seeing the photos, hired Gloria Allred to file a lawsuit against Dodi, which she dropped after his death.) Richard Kay wrote in the Daily Mail that Diana had told a “close friend” that “she wants to get a life—a real life She’s sick of all the cloak-and-dagger stuff. Why shouldn’t she have a man in her life, and for people to know about it?” In her book Diana in Search of Herself, Sally Bedell Smith noted that, according to Diana’s friends, this message was “meant for one reader, Hasnat Khan.” Diana’s Final Trip After her return from Bosnia, Diana went on a cruise with her friend Rosa Monckton, the former managing director of Tiffany & Co., who disapproved of Mohamed Al Fayed as a traveling companion for Diana and had advised her not to vacation with his family.

During that trip, Diana told Monckton that the relationship with Hasnat was over and that Dodi was going to give her a ring and that it was “going firmly on my right hand.” The two talked much more about Hasnat than they did Dodi, and Monckton strongly believes to this day that the relationship with Dodi was designed to make Hasnat jealous. The friends of Diana with whom I spoke insist that she had broken off the relationship out of frustration that Hasnat wouldn’t agree to marry, or even to go public. “Hasnat was a decent, intensely private man from a traditional, conservative Pakistani family, and he was worried about how it would work,” Jemima Khan told me. “And he hated the thought of being in the glare of publicity for the rest of his life.” Diana’s friends were under the impression that Diana had by no means given up on Hasnat, whatever his own reluctance. He told police investigating her death, “My main concern about us getting married was that my life would be hell because of who she was.

I knew I would not be able to live a normal life and if we ever had children together, I would not be able to take them anywhere or do normal things with them.” A few days after their last meeting, Diana flew to Paris to see Dodi. She found in him someone who had seemingly endless time for her. But, again, it may also be that she was using him to force Hasnat’s hand. Even after Diana broke things off with Hasnat, she contacted his family and gave the impression that the two were still together. Both Lady Annabel Goldsmith and Rosa Monckton spoke publicly at the British inquest in 2008 about Diana’s love for Hasnat and the improbability of a serious relationship with Dodi Al Fayed. Monckton was obliged, in her appearance, to reveal that there was no way Diana could have been pregnant with Dodi’s child. Just a week before her trip to Paris with him, Diana had been on the cruise with Monckton and had had her period. The world is well acquainted with Diana’s final trip with Dodi and the frenetic last night in Paris, which ended with a high-speed chase through the Alma Tunnel and a fatal crash.

Hasnat Khan tried to reach Diana the night of her death, but she had changed her number. He went to her funeral in sunglasses and barely spoke to other guests. He still lives in the U.K. and is a heart surgeon. He has reportedly had two engagements since Diana, and one marriage, which ended quickly. “I think that if Diana were alive today, we would have remained very good friends, whatever she did and whomever she was with,” Hasnat told police. “It is a huge loss when someone very close to you dies. I do not know what Diana was like in other relationships but she protected me very well, not just from the media but also from a lot of information. Perhaps she protected me because she thought we had a future together.” And Hasnat has been protecting her ever since. Share

Question: From where did the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales start?
Answer: Kensington Palace.